Dandelion Wine Discussion Questions

1. The metaphor tells how the summer itself is just but a memory. The entire theme within the novel is but memories and how people have come to love, forget, cherish, and hate these memories, but how they make up a certain individual. This was what the importance was of the Dandelion wine, they were but memories to be remembered, but digested by those who made them. He in way is saying the memories in your past make you who you are.

2. He was putting to much attention into the machine rather than his family. She also likely believed that the machine was a solution to something missing in their marriage, which she failed to notice. They are unhappy because the machine showed them images of places they wished to be, but could never visit, thus when it was over and they exited the machine, they were unhappy because they could never visit it. Ultimately, the machine ironically made people sadder than it's original intention to make people happier. It reflects on how the very things that originally made people happy near completely alters their character, most often emotionally.

3.It represents the battleground between the town and nature. Its shows the unexplored regions that society has long forgotten, or wished to leave unexplored, for danger of what lurks within it, or just the pure sight of it. The deepness of the ravine and its unsettled area makes it that much dangerous, how it remains unaltered by man.

4. Yes, because it represented how she could no longer live in the past, or more focus on it, when her present was still there. It wasn't more that she was denying she had a past, but more that she was letting go of it instead of keeping it in the back of her head that she will always be that same little girl. No, since his novel is more based around how memories change people, not that people have to let go of those memories if they wish to move forward. It is simply in this depiction that Mrs. Bentley was so wrapped up in her past that she had to force it away from her instead of hoping for it to return.

5. Yes, because the point of the records were to keep lessons about the summer that they learned from the people within their town. As young boys, they take everything they learn from adults literally, as if it is the truth.

6. He is a serial killer, who at night, stalks the ravine and dumps the bodies into it. Yes, she does. They are angered, because there is nothing to fear anymore, thus no exitemnt.

7. It is believed that from the heat, he has gotten some sort of stroke. Jonas gives him to bottles of pure air to breath in through his nose.

8. No, because that is the entire point of the dandelion wine, they are memories that he has stored for each summer, until he is ready to take these memories. He must really dislike summer, considering his entire focus is how it is merely just a memory.